Noel Thompson, Left in the Wilderness: The Political Economy of British Democratic Socialism Since 1979.

Noel Thompson 

Left in the Wilderness: The Political Economy of British Democratic Socialism Since 1979

Acumen Publishing, Chesham, 2002, 320 pp.

ISBN 1-902683-53-6 (hbk) 45 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 1-902-68354-4 (pbk) 16.99 [pounds sterling]

It is more than twenty years now since Perry Anderson drew attention to two fundamental flaws in the Left's traditional avoidance of utopian thinking. In its absence, we had radically underestimated the complexity of future political and economic institutions, and failed to politically persuade subordinate classes of their feasibility as alternatives to the existing capitalist order. For Anderson, these weaknesses had severely undermined the socialist project:

   In recent years the very notion of
   socialism as an alternative form of
   civilisation has become effaced and
   remote ... In these conditions, it is
   all the more necessary to put a quite
   renewed emphasis on socialism as a
   future society ... whose articulated
   form it is essential to debate at once
   as boldly and as concretely as
   possible. (Anderson, 1983: 97)
   Institutional specification was crucial
   here: '[W]ithout serious exploration
   and mapping of it, any political advance
   beyond a parliamentary capitalism will
   continue to be blocked. No working
   class or popular bloc in a Western
   society will ever make a leap in the dark,
   at this point in history' (ibid: 99).

One of the areas for institutional investigation that Anderson pointed to was 'the pattern of an advanced socialist economy'. Following the demise of Keynesianism, but in an historical and political context certainly no more favourable to socialism than that of two decades ago, Noel Thompson has rounded up the main contenders for the mantle of 'economic blueprint for the future', and subjected them to comprehensive critical analysis.

Thompson's book covers a wide range of models and projects for a Left political economy and, not surprisingly, there is a significant degree of variation amongst the contenders. One central dimension concerns their political aim. Certain models make no claim to be transcending the forms and relations of capitalist production, merely reforming it as best as possible in highly inhospitable circumstances--the recent examples of New Labour and 'radical stakeholderism' clearly fall into this category.

Of those whose political horizons stretched further, aiming to make significant inroads into the capitalist economy up to its ultimate transformation, key distinctions can be drawn over their geographical scope and reach. Thompson's optic ranges over multinational efforts, traditional national state strategies, novel attempts that harness local states and economic regions, right down to the reorientation of single economic units.

Some are clearly vulnerable to the well-known charge of being too small in their scope to ever realise their anti-capitalist aims, their distortion and eventual capitulation to capitalist modes of operating in actual practice being all too evident. Such a fate befell worker co-ops and local state strategies alike in the hostile and constraining economic contexts of the 1980s and 1990s, as Thompson has little difficulty in showing.

Others of potentially greater substance have proved equally unsuccessful. The 'alternative economic strategy' (AES) promised a thorough democratisation of national economic power through its policy mixture of public ownership, industrial democracy, national planning agreements and planned trade. Thompson argues that it proved unable to be implemented unilaterally in any one nation-state in a context of global economic recession and increasing integration--as vividly demonstrated in the experience of the Mitterand government in France during the early 1980s. Combined with its domestic failure to politically conquer the Labour party, and internally beset by divisions between revolutionary and reformist impulses, its brief moment of glory in the early 1980s was followed by a steep decline and a shrinkage of the horizons of Left political economy.

What Thompson calls 'multinational socialism'--a strategy to recoup lost powers by effectively moving the AES to a larger stage, that of the EU--fared no better at the end of the 1980s. Designed to counter the constrictions on alternative socio-economic programmes exercised by international capital, its advocates were led astray by their identification of the EU as a likely institutional framework for socialist advance.

Thompson shows that the structures and strategic priorities of the EU have been resolutely fixed on a neoliberal, free-market project embodied in such policies as the single currency and in anti-democratic institutions like the European Central Bank. These left no room for alternative strategies seeking full employment, or extensive welfare to foster social solidarity, let alone those aiming to exercise substantive control over international capital flows. To implement such ideals, he argues, it would have been necessary to construct a central European government--a prospect not on the agenda of the multinational socialists--wresting powers away from the European Commission and Central Bank to exert real democratic control over the EU. Furthermore, the abandonment of any political alternative to neoliberalism by European social democratic parties stripped the project of any mainstream political vehicle with which to further its ambitions.

More novel attempts to respond to the growing dominance of neoliberalism by taking over key capitalist institutions and practices and hoping to rework them for socialist ends also fall within Thompson's orbit. That of market socialism, heavily tied to contemporary processes of economic reform underway in Eastern Europe, purported to recruit neoclassical ideals of perfect competition and market efficiency for the socialist cause. Combined with a new decentralisation of economic power and more equitable wealth distribution in a pluralistic economic structure, this produced a 'capitalist road to socialism' that proved easily open to sustained objection.

Thus, its claims to combine 'equality with economic efficiency' by integrating the market within the socialist project offered no convincing response to long-running socialist critiques of the market as a generator of material inequalities. The potentially destabilising influence on socialism of encouraging capitalist values of consumerism and greed was also glossed over. And, most telling of all, its advocates provided no strategic vision of how such a model could ever be realised in practice--either in terms of specifying any relevant objective dynamics inherent within contemporary capitalism, the agents of such a project, or its likely sources of resistance. As Thompson concludes, the rapid translation of the dynamic of reform in Eastern Europe into a neoliberal capitalist solution left the market socialists historically bereft and redundant.

The other option here was that of post-Fordist socialism, an attempt to reorient Left political economy in changing socio-economic conditions where a new mode of industrial organisation was allegedly emerging. Small-scale, short-run production processes depending on multi-skilled labour were now supposedly supplanting the era of mass production, driven by new structures of diversified consumer demand and volatile economic conditions.

This model envisioned a new socialist political economy of 'flexible specialisation' being launched to take advantage of contemporary trends for multi-skilled autonomous labour, the decentrali-sation of economic power, and a reintegration of creativity into the world of work.

Increasing interdependence and cooperation between individual firms in new industrial districts, and greater power for these regions and localities, also pointed beyond existing capitalist strategies and neoliberal priorities.

In response to such a grandiose vision, Thompson draws upon a variety of critics who have punctured substantial holes in the post-Fordist dream. The vision of a new mode of industrial organisation was empirically unproven, as Thompson's review of a range of case studies shows. Here, such enduring phenomena as deskilling, an intensification of labour and the 'manufacture of consent' through new forms of work involvement were more likely to be found than creative, highly-skilled or worker-controlled 'post-Fordist' production processes.

The reality of 'flexible specialisation' was its function as a new strategy for capital to exploit labour through new technologies and new patterns of production organisation, rather than its serving as a new economic base for socialist advance.

Equally damning were the conceptual ambiguities contained within the metahistorical division of capitalism into Fordist and post-Fordist phases, and the persistence of mass production in new forms capable of supplying goods for 'niche marketing'. The vulnerability of post-Fordist production processes to the power that international capital exerted over their financial and organisational contexts was also neglected. One example Thompson gives here is the subordination of regional and local state strategies to the priorities of transnational corporations and their increasingly centralised control over global strategies that encompassed well-documented shifts towards decentralised production processes.

Perhaps most fatal of all was the theoretical reliance upon the market and its discriminating consumers as prime movers of this whole epochal shift--as if customised demand could rewrite production organisation and unleash a virtuous dynamic of individual realisation, democratic decision-making and technological advance. As Thompson notes, many have found this model to be a clear accommodation to the contemporary ideology of capitalism--a correct enough estimation.

The case marshalled against these particular candidates for a new Left political economy by Thompson is impressive. However, he also has a more general argument against the prospects for any future Left political economy, and it is here that critical attention needs to be most focused. For his claim is that the modern form of capitalism has effectively removed any space for an alternative economic order to be built.

Here, it is the diminished role that any nation-state can autonomously play in an increasingly integrated global economy that is the main concern, its demise stripping the Left of its prime agent for any alternative strategy. External constraints and interdependencies have massively grown as trade and money flows have been internationalised, and transnational corporations increased their powers. Any attempts to revive macroeconomic management and pursue strategies of full employment, etc., through appropriate fiscal and monetary policies, are rendered futile in this context.

As an example, Thompson argues that the globalisation of trade and finance has left nation-states increasingly dependent on speculative capital flows and market forces as determinants of economic policy. If policies are announced that are opposed by international capital, then financial and capital flight can result. This liberalisation rules out the restoration of the old-style exchange and capital controls necessary for economic decision-making. Alongside this, the growing power of transnational corporations, and their ability to decide where production will be located and to extract concessions from nation-states, acts as a further brake--as regards levels of taxation, for instance. Both expansionary and redistributive aspects of traditional Left political economies are thereby increasingly undermined.

Now it is against the backdrop of this new economic reality that Thompson sees more recent Left political economies as having been developed, in full recognition of the increasing constraints on their policy options that the era of global capital exerts. The 'supply side socialisms' of New Labour and 'radical stakeholderism' are therefore given a much less critical ride than earlier candidates for incorporating this very recognition.

The New Labour option was to combine economic dynamism with social justice through upgrading the skills base of the labour force. Tellingly, Thompson sees this as marred only by the obstacles standing in the way of human capital investment--such as funding, relevance to global capital and its tenuous relationship to labour productivity--rather than by its overall insufficiency as a challenge to capitalist power and privilege.

Its more radical stakeholder cousin (associated especially with the work of Will Hutton) is seen as offering a more substantial alternative. This centres on the reform of relations within economic organisations to encourage greater democracy and incorporate interests from the wider social nexus (the 'stakeholders'), new forms of corporate governance to secure long-term investment strategies, and a rebalancing of finance--industry relations.

Having laid out its programme, Thompson then makes a curious methodological move, exempting this candidate from any critique of its proposals, and instead focusing upon its political failures to gain ground within New Labour. Since all the other models examined are subjected to a common account/critique approach, we have here a bizarre absence. Perhaps it represents Thompson's preferred solution, though one currently lacking any political power. Equally strange, methodologically, is the extra attention given to the case of worker co-ops--granted two chapters instead of the standard one--with the bulk of the first devoted to a lengthy refutation of the neoclassical critique of co-ops as inefficient. Quite why that is so important to future Left political economy and strategy is beyond me.

In the end, though, it is the 'globalisation = the death of socialism' thesis that is the ultimate weakness in Thompson's work. This is hardly an original argument, nor one that is uncontested, as readers of Capital & Class will be all too aware. If we look beyond Thompson's fixation on the nation-state as the prime--or even sole--agent of socialist advance, other contributors to the globalisation debate have laid out alternative perspectives that carry more positive political conclusions.

The work of Kim Moody is concerned with examining how the uneven spread of global capital has also carried with it an equally uneven expansion of a global working class. In Workers in a Lean World, Moody looks at the way a new set of organisational contexts and challenges has called forth a new form of 'social unionism' amongst a diversified proletariat: one that seeks to reach out to social issues beyond the immediate workplace and build a new class-based politics. Such a concern with the contemporary state of class relations is notably absent from Thompson's perspective, although it is surely central to the prospects for building any alternative economic order.

Reviewed by Richard Leitch